Case Study: Target scales microservices across clouds with HashiCorp Nomad

Nomad at Target Scaling Microservices Across Public and Private Clouds

Target, the U.S. retailer behind Target.com, needed a way to deploy and manage hundreds of microservices consistently across its stores, data centers, and public cloud environments. The team wanted to reuse existing Docker-based applications, keep deployment workflows fast, and avoid introducing the complexity of running Kubernetes or rebuilding applications into RPMs. HashiCorp tools including Nomad, Terraform, Consul, and Vault were selected to meet these requirements.

Using HashiCorp Nomad as the core orchestration layer, Target automated deployments through Terraform and integrated service discovery and secrets management with Consul and Vault. The result was a faster, more flexible platform that moved applications from proof of concept to production in just a couple of months, enabled multiple deployments per day, and supported large workloads such as an ELK stack ingesting around 300GB of data per day. Target also saw benefits in blue-green deployments, operational visibility, and reuse of the same infrastructure patterns across cloud and on-premises environments.

Target

Suresh Krishnan

Lead Engineer